Cell Bytes

The Square application is now available for the iPhone and Android, looking to redefine how businesses can accept payment for goods.

Square is all about the receipt. Most small businesses make a combination of cash and card sales. With traditional paper receipts cash sales are anonymous. Square’s electronic receipts let you capture and track more vital information about each sale, including location and an itemized purchase list, and also include a photo and link to your website on the customer’s receipt.

As reviewed on IntoMobile:

The system involves a small dongle that plugs into the headphone jack of the iPhone or iPod Touchand this is used to swipe acredit card. The app then securely sends the information over the air and the end user has to sign the device with their finger to complete the transaction. A receipt (with optional geotagging) is then sent to the customer via e-mail or SMS and funds are withdrawn like normal.

Read full article.

A clever currency card sends its owner a free text message alert when it runs low on money. [via easierFinance.com]

The service is available to all new Travelex Cash Passport cardholders, through a partnership with Monitise, a UK mobile banking and payments provider.

Customers signing up to the card will have peace of mind knowing that they will receive a free text message on their mobile phone when their card’s credit drops below £100.

They can then call Travelex, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, go online or visit a branch to reload their card with more money and avoid any embarrassing moments.

In the weeks following the January 12 earthquake, the relief effort in Haiti relied in part on crowdsourcing: an army of volunteers in the United States and elsewhere helped sift through emergency text messages, translated them and send them on to first responders on the scene.

According to Rob Munro, a graduate fellow at Stanford who works with the nonprofit Energy for Opportunity, about 40,000 useful text messages came through the system in the first six weeks, meaning that thousands of Haitians received timely requests for food, water or medical help.

But the high-tech Haiti volunteer response also depended in large part on personal connections, and the mobilization of the Haitian diaspora in North America, for it to work. Now development agencies, relief workers and even the U.S. government are looking at ways to reproduce the experiment in the next emergency.

Read full article in Wired. Image from CNN via Techilobang.

Spotted on Greenvehicle Recycling via Don’t Twive. By cartoonist Joe Heller.

Excerpt from:
Apple "HD" Apps are iPad Only [Apps]